Ubisoft released the best addition to The Tyranny of King Washington with their newest DLC pack, The Redemption. Despite being the best pack of the three, Redemption lacks the overwhelming amount of quality necessary to justify this DLC trilogy. It’s just too little, too late.

Episode three kicks off with a naval battle as Connor sails from Boston to New York, an obvious teaser for the pirate themed Assassin's Creed IV (that game's protagonist is even mentioned). Connor commands the ship in an epic, cannonball slinging fight. As I watched my enemy’s vessel splinter while I steered the ship through the cannonball fire, I felt as if Redemption might deliver the quality experience I desired from an Assassin’s Creed DLC. Unfortunately, Ubisoft destroyed my rising excitement for the potential of the game the moment Connor hit land.

The repetitive and clunky gameplay in New York made it clear the developers have moved past Connor’s adventures. The same side missions of helping starving children and ambushing caravans return from the first episode.The game’s length clocks in at around two hours. It strikes me as lazy for Redemption to use time from an already short DLC on missions that don’t enhance the story.

Connor also doesn’t like to be told what to do. The controls only work right about half the time. Having to use clunky controls through boring missions can be frustrating. If Ubisoft didn’t want to create too much new content for Redemption, the least they could have done was to make the reused content play fluidly.

As in the previous episodes, Connor gains a unique animal power in this DLC; this time it’s the Power of the Bear. The Power of the Bear grants Connor the ability to do a ground-pound, an odd move for Connor to have in his arsenal. I think that this time around Ubisoft felt obligated to include the animal power gimmick, and chose the Bear Power, even though it makes little sense.

Despite my issues with the gameplay, I could tell that Ubisoft tried to address some of the complaints they received about the previous episodes. While episodes one and two shamelessly reuse environments, episode three gives us a fresh take on New York as the tyrannical Washington redesigns the city in the spirit of the empires of old. This is exemplified by a pyramid being built towards the lower end of Manhattan. A change in the aesthetics of the environment is a small thing, but it’s nice to have something fresh.